


not gonna save you (go save yourself)

by SiderumInCaelo



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Friends to Enemies, Gen, Introspection, Marauders' Era, POV Lily Evans Potter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 01:34:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14631303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SiderumInCaelo/pseuds/SiderumInCaelo
Summary: Not being friends with Severus is better than being friends with him, Lily finds.





	not gonna save you (go save yourself)

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from "Wondergirl" by Hey Monday.

Something that Lily doesn't like to admit, even to herself, is that in the aftermath of Severus calling her _that word_ , she was mostly relieved.  She was plenty angry, of course, what with five years of increasingly disappointing behavior as fuel, and she was sad about what was once her closest friendship ending so poorly, but underneath that was a sense of relief that only became stronger as time passed. 

Because her friendship with Severus had been _exhausting_.  He was always so defensive – about his clothes, about his looks, about his poverty, about his House, about his blood – and while she was sympathetic about some of it, it meant he was in too sour of a mood to be good company on a regular basis, and an awful lot of their conversations involved nothing more than her trying to make him feel better.

And even that would have been okay – after all, he was her friend, she quite genuinely wanted to be there for him – except that he never really managed to do the same for her.  Oh, he was happy enough to listen to her complain about homework, but that was about it.  He didn’t even feign interest when she talked about dormmates (she never could figure out if it was because they were Gryffindors or because it was too _girly_ ); she couldn’t so much as mention James Potter or his friends without being treated to a half-hour rant of everything they’d ever done to Severus.  And she agreed with him, but it got boring when she’d heard it all before, and sometimes she just didn’t have the energy to deal with his anger.  She couldn’t talk about her parents, because it reminded Severus of his, which made him moody, and she’d given up trying to explain why Petunia’s rejection hurt, since it was so obvious that he couldn’t fathom why she would care what a Muggle thought of her.

The worst was that she couldn’t talk to him about all the anti-muggleborn sentiment at Hogwarts, which only got more noticeable – and more threatening – as she got older.  This, out of everything, seemed like something he should be on her side about!  After all, his father was Muggle, he grew up in a Muggle neighborhood, and he’d complained about how only purebloods were at the top of the social hierarchy in Slytherin.  And yet whenever she brought it up, he tried to excuse it.  It was just how things were, and besides, not all Slytherins were like that, _he_ wasn’t like that so why was she complaining, Potter was just as bad anyway, and maybe she was just being overly sensitive.  She’d long stopped expecting him to defend her in public (he said it was because Slytherins took intra-House unity seriously and if he openly criticized a Housemate he’d pay for it, though that had never explained why he also ignored the taunts and insults she occasionally got from non-Slytherins), but he wouldn’t even listen and nod along sympathetically in private.

She had learned, over the years, that being his friend meant worrying about him all the time, even – or perhaps especially – when she was annoyed with him.  She worried about his home life, she worried about how Potter and Black (and Pettigrew and Lupin, to a lesser expect) targeted him, and she worried about how the other Slytherins treated him, but she also worried that he was going to become one of those people who wanted her and everyone like her dead.

Now that their friendship is irreparably destroyed, she doesn't have to worry about any of that anymore (well, except perhaps the last one, but that was out of concern for her safety, not his).  She realizes that it wasn't her job to make him into a better person, and she discovers that she's happier now that she's not sinking time and energy in to a relationship that gave her nothing in return.  It's not nice, realizing that she's so much better off without his friendship, but it's the truth, and by the time she returns to school in the fall, she finds herself wishing that he’d broken their friendship earlier. 


End file.
